Fleeing to a prop closet upstage of the legs, Delia hid herself behind it.

The s.p.a.ce was maddeningly shallow.

All it would take was one glance her way and the game would be up.

But the strange, soiled couple that emerged from the backways, and Jonquil Brindisi behind them, had eyes only for the denim-clad man making his slow entrance onto the stage.

From the first, as she and Dex explored the stairwells, Tweed had been bold in calling out to Gerber Waddell.

Reckless even.

She had known it, but her giddy state led her to take risks. And because they were brandishing some pretty mean cutlery, she felt safe.

Tweed could tell the wandering students were impressed by her and Dex's role as deputies. They had picked up strays in the hall and in the first two stairwells they examined.

In the close confines of tile and steel and gum-encrusted steps, their shouts to the janitor doubled back upon them in weird echoes.

When they reached the east stairwell, they found an odd lot of sober kids outside the door. Another lot stood inside the stairwell, their eyes fastened upon a trio of corpses.

The old feeling of helplessness flooded into Tweed again. Suddenly she had no will to hold up her knives.

Her heart held not much fondness for Cobra, Rocky, or Sandy. But violent death levels all victims.

Somehow Dex rallied.

Somehow he said just what everybody needed to hear to start them on their way toward the auditorium. Something about the princ.i.p.al having a plan, though Tweed couldn't recall Futzy saying anything planworthy in the gym.

Now they were sitting with their contingent of strays in the left front block of seats, as other unsuccessful troops straggled in emptyhanded.

Their flashlight beams did a feeble dance along the sloping aisles as they walked.

Someone slow-scanned, high across the auditorium's stage-right wall, the motto painted in large gold letters: "The strength of a nation lies in the regimentation of its youth."

No one said much.

Faces were drawn.

Young shoulders slumped forlornly.

Mr. b.u.t.tweiler and Miss Phipps sat side by side on the edge of the stage. They had no plan. Dex had been speaking from some wishful place in his head. But no one, certainly not Tweed, seemed in any mood to ding him for it.

The princ.i.p.al's spindly legs rhythmed at random, shoe heels nearly knocking against the stage front. Hands clasped earnestly in his lap, he leaned to say something to Miss Phipps.

She nodded.

Grimacing, he began to rise.

But when he was halfway up, Tweed's attention shot to the right.

Onstage, someone was emerging from between hanging dark curtains.

Hands, arms, chest.

Objects gleamed from his fistsa"

It was Gerber Waddell!

a"shiny objects, a thin one, a thick one.

The janitor's face was shrouded in washes of death, the deaths he had brought about.

Futzy stood in shock, a hand at one pocket. His head hung dumbly, as if he'd just been told his best friend had died.

Tweed's brain teemed.

It's the slasher, said one part of her mind. Run!

But voices, high and fast and full of anger, were rising all about her. Another part of her mind latched onto them, found resonance with that feeling, and rose with them.

Dex shouted beside her, his face as red as a newborn robin cheeping for worms.

Sounds were issuing too from her.

The air was full of movement. Flutterings. Hard young bodies rushing forward.

Across the black floor of the stage staggered the head janitor, a dumb slow feeb of a slasher. Tweed wondered how he had surprised or bested anyone.

Futzy stood transfixed. Then his hand was fumbling in his pocket and he pulled out a gun, the great unequalizer, death-power packed in a fistful of metal. With a deafening blow, Futzy punched the air before him.

The feeb's left shoulder yanked back. A man and woman entered from the wings behind him.

Far from stopping Tweed and the others, the gunshot drove them into a greater frenzy. Down the aisles they teemed, surging up the stairs in a rush of bodies.

Tweed watched the couplea"odd correspondence student typesa"seize the janitor and wrest the ice pick from him. The man drove it into his neck and left it there.

Jonquil Brindisi came onstage.

Then Tweed swept into a surge of prom fabric that rushed past the princ.i.p.al, rudely thrusting Futzy b.u.t.tweiler aside like flotsam in a stream. The steel gleam of futtering cleavers winked in every hand, her own hand, Dex's too, their long knives absurdly left at their seats.

But that was okay.

One cut, one slice among the hundreds now sweeping in, would be enough.

The stage thundered as a choke of bodies came in all about. Despite the collisions, one purpose thrived. One thirst that kept the bodies honed in on the falling janitor, the hacked man whose denim suit shredded off in tufts of cloth and flesh.

In they dove, young birdbodies, a sharp hack and away, circling to swoop down for more.

Deep-hued as barbecue sauce, Gerber's blood splashed suits and dresses. Tweed's dress. She grew high and giddy, gaiety and rage intermingled in the sounds she made.

A man lay stripped before her, more exposed as each moment pa.s.sed, bits of cloth, flesh, and organs filling the air like blood-tinged chokes of cottonwood.

She breathed meat.

She breathed madness.

Their victim's mind, sick and vicious even under attack, unspooled itself in death, flinging out darts of vileness.

But shea"and all of them, this happy band of hackers and hewersa"resisted those darts. In the shaping of communal grave-clouts were they caught up, weaving it, shuttled, hack by flurried hack, upon a loom of common cause.

Righteous was their wrath and beautiful.

She would tell all of this joy to her dad.

Her sister Jenna too, whose prom would be a cakewalk after this.

Through a turmoil of bodies, slapping and smacking in earnesta"by G.o.d, the dance only hinted at ita"Tweed saw her means of ingress. She seized it, rode it in, war whoops in her throat, her hand coming down, no choice really in what prize she would slice off, all of it a matter of fate and luck.

Like a coelacanth's mouth still moist from feeding, a meaty flesh-hole wuttered up at her. Its wet, red, ragged regret ovaled out to yield a slice of organ.

Slash! She held it against the blade as she pulled out, a nub of gore trapped between thumb and steel. Ms. Foddereau's butchery cla.s.s paid off in spades.

"I got a nipple!" Dex screamed. "I got a nipple!"

Tweed became Dex's magnet, retiring with him upstage. Behind them, the pounding and battering of bodies kept up. In another moment, the killer would be reduced to bone, and soon that would be divvied up as well.

Tweed tugged at Dex's sleeve. "Look," she said. "Our teachers are up to their elbows in it too."

The air was misty with blood. But the spray was fine enough, atomized even, that they clearly saw Nurse Gaskin sail in; Claude Versailles, whose outsized body belied the deftness of his killer cuts; Ms. Brindisi, Miss Phipps, Mr. b.u.t.tweiler, and the others.

Tweed billowed with pride in Corundum High.

Out of a night of trauma, they were pulling together. Students and faculty alike.

For all the h.e.l.l they had endured, a special bond would unite them forever, a bond as tight and conjoining as the mad janitor's futtered body was loose and undergoing disjointure.

Tweed gripped her b.l.o.o.d.y prize and smiled at Dex, who beamed back at her and held up the ruddy whorl of his catch.

Something jinged like a spun quarter at her feet. She looked down. "A key," she said.

It was gold and thick and angled. The word YALE gleamed upon it.

"The key to the padlock on the front door is my guess," said Dex. He bent to pick it up. "The one he took from the sheriff."

Tweed touched it in Dex's hand. Hard planes. The key was wet from the janitor's futtering, warm from his pocket.

She slid a finger along its length. She kept sliding, clasped Dex's hand, palm to palm, the key to their salvation trapped between.

Then she lost herself in her boyfriend's eyes.

24. The Mouths of Babes.

Friday, October twenty-sixth.

Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude's generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy b.u.t.tweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.

Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.

A lot of changes had come down.

Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had l.u.s.ted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her pa.s.sions.

The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.

Lovey-dovey motherf.u.c.kers.

Futzy had replaced his pair of h.e.l.lions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.

And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in l.u.s.t with Bix Donner's widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.

Trilby's little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.

Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.

"Now that the media brouhaha has died down," continued Futzy, Adora's loving eyes on him, "I thought a nice quiet evening of putting the pieces together would benefit us all."

Claude nodded and spoke. "A final look at things, one last breath and benediction before we move on with our lives. Is that what you mean?"

Jonquil, bemused, said nothing.

What a load of c.r.a.p this was. Were they a bunch of f.u.c.king wimps? She could take on such a night again easily. Truth be told, she missed it already. The terror, the hunt, the futtering of the crazy janitor whose bones she had wanted to leap but had ended up breaking instead.

Might it somehow happen again?

She thrilled at the thought.

"Yes," said Nurse Gaskin. "Victims of major traumas tend to obsess about them. We should look on this retelling as a ritual signpost, a mark of punctuation on the way to healing."

"Back to normal after tonight, eh?" said Jonquil. The looks Bray and Winnie gave her reinforced her doubt.

"By no means." Nurse Gaskin's eyes flared with hatred.

Then she smoothed it over.